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Charles Riechers
Mr. Riechers Job Description The U.S. Air Force's No. 2 acquisition official principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition working on * some of the Air Force's highest priority weapons programs * $40-billion aerial refueling tanker for which the contract is due to be awarded late this year or early next * $15-billion combat search-and-rescue helicopter. facing scrutiny for a temporary job arranged by the service while he awaited Senate confirmation Mr. Riechers Death internal Air Force memo obtained by Reuters on October 15, 2007 "Mr. Riechers was found deceased in his home, cause of death appears to be suicide, time of death is unknown," the Air Force said his death was not expected to affect any contract awards for weapons programs Riechers' body was discovered by a friend at his home in Loudoun County, Va., near Washington around 8 p.m. on Sunday, according to the local sheriff's office. Fairfax County medical examiner release results of an autopsy October 16, 2007 Air Force's Response To His Death Air Force spokeswoman Jennifer Bentley said the AF was deeply saddened by Riechers' death, but gave no details. "While Mr. Riechers was an integral part of these programs, the Air Force does not foresee any delays to these acquisition program schedules," Background Riechers' predecessor, Darleen Druyun, served nine months in prison in 2005. She was convicted of violating federal conflict-of-interest laws by taking a job with Boeing while still overseeing billions of dollars of its work for the Air Force. Commonwealth Research Institute Riechers was hired for two months by defense contractor Commonwealth Research Institute at the request of the Air Force while he was out of work and awaiting Senate confirmation for his new position. The short-term job paid $13,400 a month. (Washington Post, Oct. 1, 2007) Commonwealth has close ties to the Pentagon received hundreds of millions of dollars in military grants and contracts in recent years(Washington Post, Oct. 1, 2007) "I really didn't do anything for CRI," Riechers, "I got a paycheck from them."(Washington Post, Oct. 1, 2007) At the time, the Air Force downplayed the report, saying the temporary job was a common arrangement to help the service under an existing contract. A spokeswoman also said Riechers had been quoted out of context. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin * criticized the deal * asked the Air Force to explain the arrangemen New questions arose Friday about Commonwealth when Pemco Aviation Group amended its protest of a $1.2-billion contract to Boeing Co. for maintenance of the existing fleet of KC-135 refueling tankers. Pemco raised questions about Riechers' possible conflict of interest because of ties among Commonwealth, its parent Concurrent Technologies, and Boeing. SETBACK SEEN One defense analyst said Riechers' death is yet another setback for the Air Force's weapons-buying office. "Whatever the reason for the suicide, this is going to contribute to a widespread perception that something is not right about the Air Force acquisition system," said Loren Thompson at the Virginia-based Lexington Institute. "Riechers was under some suspicion because of an expose in the press, but it certainly didn't rise to the level of a serious scandal, so his apparent suicide is hard to explain," Thompson added. That scandal involving his predecessor, Darleen Druyun, prompted Congress to scrap a $23.5 billion tanker deal with Boeing. The service is poised to announce a new contract award in the next few months. Congressional auditors this year twice upheld protests about the $15 billion Air Force search and rescue helicopter deal that initially went to Boeing. Riechers Service according to Air Force Web site: * Riechers was on active duty with the Air Force for 20 years until 2002 * joined SRI International, a nonprofit scientific research institute, after leaving AF * From 2002 until November 2006 he worked at various Pentagon offices **including as chief of operations for the Advanced Concept and Technology Demonstration program * In November, 2007 senior technical adviser for Commonwealth ** "with assignment to the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition," NOTES3 Suicide Is Not Painless, By FRANK RICH, October 21, 2007, Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company IT was one of those stories lost in the newspaper’s inside pages. Last week a man you’ve never heard of — Charles D. Riechers, 47, the second-highest-ranking procurement officer in the United States Air Force — killed himself by running his car’s engine in his suburban Virginia garage. Mr. Riechers’s suicide occurred just two weeks after his appearance in a front-page exposé in The Washington Post. The Post reported that the Air Force had asked a defense contractor, Commonwealth Research Institute, to give him a job with no known duties while he waited for official clearance for his new Pentagon assignment. Mr. Riechers, a decorated Air Force officer earlier in his career, told The Post: “I really didn’t do anything for C.R.I. I got a paycheck from them.” The question, of course, was whether the contractor might expect favors in return once he arrived at the Pentagon last January. Set against the epic corruption that has defined the war in Iraq, Mr. Riechers’s tragic tale is but a passing anecdote, his infraction at most a misdemeanor. The $26,788 he received for two months in a non-job doesn’t rise even to a rounding error in the Iraq-Afghanistan money pit. So far some $6 billion worth of contracts are being investigated for waste and fraud, however slowly, by the Pentagon and the Justice Department. That doesn’t include the unaccounted-for piles of cash, some $9 billion in Iraqi funds, that vanished during L. Paul Bremer’s short but disastrous reign in the Green Zone. Yet Mr. Riechers, not the first suicide connected to the war’s corruption scandals, is a window into the culture of the whole debacle. Through his story you can see how America has routinely betrayed the very values of democratic governance that it hoped to export to Iraq. Look deeper and you can see how the wholesale corruption of government contracting sabotaged the crucial mission that might have enabled us to secure the country: the rebuilding of the Iraqi infrastructure, from electricity to hospitals. You can also see just why the heretofore press-shy Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater USA, staged a rapid-fire media blitz a week ago, sitting down with Charlie Rose, Lara Logan, Lisa Myers and Wolf Blitzer. Mr. Prince wasn’t trying to save his employees from legal culpability in the deaths of 17 innocent Iraqis mowed down on Sept. 16 in Baghdad. He knows that the legal loopholes granted contractors by Mr. Bremer back in 2004 amount to a get-out-of-jail-free card. He knows that Americans will forget about another 17 Iraqi casualties as soon as Blackwater gets some wrist-slapping punishment. Instead, Mr. Prince is moving on, salivating over the next payday. As he told The Wall Street Journal last week, Blackwater no longer cares much about its security business; it is expanding into a “full spectrum” defense contractor offering a “one-stop shop” for everything from remotely piloted blimps to armored trucks. The point of his P.R. offensive was to smooth his quest for more billions of Pentagon loot. Which brings us back to Mr. Riechers. As it happens, he was only about three degrees of separation from Blackwater. His Pentagon job, managing a $30 billion Air Force procurement budget, had been previously held by an officer named Darleen Druyun, who in 2004 was sentenced to nine months in prison for securing jobs for herself, her daughter and her son-in-law at Boeing while favoring the company with billions of dollars of contracts. Ms. Druyun’s Pentagon post remained vacant until Mr. Riechers was appointed. He was brought in to clean up the corruption. Yet the full story of the corruption during Ms. Druyun’s tenure is even now still unknown. The Bush-appointed Pentagon inspector general delivered a report to Congress full of holes in 2005. Specifically, black holes: dozens of the report’s passages were redacted, as were the names of many White House officials in the report’s e-mail evidence on the Boeing machinations. The inspector general also assured Congress that neither Donald Rumsfeld nor Paul Wolfowitz knew anything about the crimes. Senators on the Armed Services Committee were incredulous. John Warner, the Virginia Republican, could not believe that the Pentagon’s top two officials had no information about “the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history.” But the inspector general who vouched for their ignorance, Joseph Schmitz, was already heading for the exit when he delivered his redacted report. His new job would be as the chief operating officer of the Prince Group, Blackwater’s parent company. Much has been made of Erik Prince and his family’s six-digit contributions to Republican candidates and lifelong connections to religious-right power brokers like James Dobson and Gary Bauer. Mr. Prince maintains that these contacts had nothing to do with Blackwater’s growth from tiny start-up to billion-dollar federal contractor in the Bush years. But far more revealing, though far less noticed, is the pedigree of the Washington players on his payroll. Blackwater’s lobbyist and sometime spokesman, for instance, is Paul Behrends, who first represented the company as a partner in the now-defunct Alexander Strategy Group. That firm, founded by a former Tom DeLay chief of staff, proved ground zero in the Jack Abramoff scandals. Alexander may be no more, but since then, in addition to Blackwater, Mr. Behrends’s clients have includeda company called the First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting Company, the builder of the new American embassy in Iraq. That Vatican-sized complex is the largest American embassy in the world. Now running some $144 million over its $592 million budget and months behind schedule, the project is notorious for its deficient, unsafe construction, some of which has come under criminal investigation. First Kuwaiti has also been accused of engaging in human trafficking to supply the labor force. But the current Bush-appointed State Department inspector general — guess what — has found no evidence of any wrongdoing. Both that inspector general, Howard Krongard, and First Kuwaiti are now in the cross hairs of Henry Waxman’s House oversight committee. Some of Mr. Krongard’s deputies have accused him of repeatedly halting or impeding investigations in a variety of fraud cases. Representative Waxman is also trying to overcome State Department stonewalling to investigate corruption in the Iraqi government. In perverse mimicry of his American patrons, Nuri al-Maliki’s office has repeatedly tried to limit the scope of inquiries conducted by Iraq’s own Commission on Public Integrity. The judge in charge of that commission, Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, has now sought asylum in America. Thirty-one of his staff members and a dozen of their relatives have been assassinated, sometimes after being tortured. The Waxman investigations notwithstanding, the culture of corruption, Iraq war division, remains firmly entrenched. Though some American bribe-takers have been caught — including Gloria Davis, an Army major who committed suicide in Kuwait after admitting her crimes last year — we are asked to believe they are isolated incidents. The higher reaches of the chain of command have been spared, much as they were at Abu Ghraib. Even a turnover in administrations doesn’t guarantee reform. J. Cofer Black, the longtime C.I.A. hand who is now Blackwater’s vice chairman, has signed on as a Mitt Romney adviser. Hillary Clinton’s Karl Rove, Mark Penn, doubles as the chief executive of Burson-Marsteller, the P.R. giant whose subsidiary helped prepare Mr. Prince for his Congressional testimony. Mr. Penn said the Blackwater association was “temporary.” War profiteering happens even in “good” wars. Arthur Miller made his name in 1947 with “All My Sons,” which ends with the suicide of a corrupt World War II contractor whose defective airplane parts cost 21 pilots their lives. But in the case of Iraq, this corruption has been at the center of the entire mission, from war-waging to nation-building. As the investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele observed in the October Vanity Fair, America has to date “spent twice as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to rebuild Iraq as it did to rebuild Japan — an industrialized country three times Iraq’s size, two of whose cities had been incinerated by atomic bombs.” (And still Iraq lacks reliable electric power.) The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq. Colonel Westhusing’s death was ruled a suicide, though some believe he was murdered by contractors fearing a whistle-blower, according to T. Christian Miller, the Los Angeles Times reporter who documents the case in his book “Blood Money.” Either way, the angry four-page letter the officer left behind for General Petraeus and his other commander, Gen. Joseph Fil, is as much an epitaph for America’s engagement in Iraq as a suicide note. “I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,” Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating the word mission. “I am sullied.”